http://www.merrillbrink.com: Increasing number of cross-border M&A deals are taking place in an ever-more demanding regulatory environment.

New York, NY (PRWEB) April 04, 2012

Increasing number of cross-border M&A deals are taking place in an ever-more demanding regulatory environment. Key decision makers can find themselves and their companies in extremely hot water if they fail to embrace a best practice approach to due diligence.

When exploring transactions with foreign partners, businesses need to minimize their chances of acquiring, or becoming linked to, a corrupt or even criminal operation. The US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) was introduced to require firms to eliminate fraud and corrupt practices in their dealings with foreign officials and organizations. Firms that do not take the required measures run the risk of being prosecuted heavily, fined and having staff subject to jail terms.

While it´s certainly clear that adhering to the FCPA should not be taken lightly, some businesses embarking on cross-border M&A find the process complex and the workload simply too demanding to execute properly. This is no excuse in the eyes of the lawmakers and it is often in a company´s interest to seek help from partners, such as outside counsel, financial and language translation providers, to help them design and implement best practice procedures throughout any due diligence process.

The first step in minimizing FCPA risk is to gather a compliance team, made up of external partners and internal experts, to help establish your company´s specific vulnerabilities and unique requirements.

Once this team has been established, your business should set about assessing the deal and the potential partner(s), to seek out any FCPA non-compliance risks. Information can be gathered through a variety of means; including questionnaires, audits and interviews, and the process will no-doubt result in the accumulation of a large number of documents and a huge amount of data. Much or all of this material will not be in English and as a result, the company is faced with the next challenge. It´s hard enough completing a thorough due diligence process and reporting findings to partners when everyone speaks the same language, but multilingual due diligence presents additional complexities.

Working with a proven language translation provider that can utilize technology to streamline the process and the workload, as well as translation for more demanding text is the key to making sure all stake holders have the requisite information they need at their fingertips. Engaging a translation provider with a history of working on complex deals containing multilingual documents will help reduce the strain on company managers.

With an eye to minimizing time and costs, the use of technologies such as Merrill Brink´s language identification, foreign language keyword search and foreign language OCR has been proven to reduce the number of documents that need translating to a fraction of the initial estimate.

The use of these technologies, combined with the expertise of specialist translation professionals with technical expertise, and web-enabled project management tools, offer dealmakers additional peace of mind so they can rest assured that they have done all that is required to minimize their FCPA exposure during a cross-border multilingual transaction.

About Merrill Brink International

Merrill Brink International (http://www.merrillbrink.com) is a leading provider of complete translation and language solutions for global companies and law firms, with special expertise in serving the legal, financial, life sciences, software, heavy machinery and corporate markets. A proven leader with more than 30 years of experience, Merrill Brink offers a wide range of language solutions including translation, localization, desktop publishing and globalization services.

Merrill Brink is recognized in the industry for its commitment to quality and its pioneering approach of leveraging technology to reduce costs, eliminate redundant processes and accelerate translation life cycles. Merrill Brink is certified to ISO 9001:2008; ISO 27001:2005 and ISO 13485:2003, and registered to EN 15038:2006 and ISO 14971:2007. Together, these standards provide assurance that the most stringent process and quality standards for translation are followed. Merrill Brink International is a wholly owned subsidiary of Merrill Corporation.

For more information, please contact Merrill Brink at translations(at)merrillbrink(dot)com or in the U.S., call 888-601-9814 or in Europe, call 44-(0)207-562-3300; Web: http://www.merrillbrink.com